Tag: Disabled

Posted in Book Review Tuesday

Book Review Tuesday (8/4/26) – Wearing the Lion

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!

I was a huge fan of John Wiswell’s debut novel, Someone You Can Build a Nest In; it got a 4.5 star rating from me, and it’s one of the few books that I’ve been able to swallow my squeamishness for body horror for just because it was so lovely and heartfelt. Naturally, I wanted to read more of Wiswell’s books. I’m not usually one for Greek myth retellings (they’re saturating the market, we’ve had enough!!!), but I trusted Wiswell enough to pull it off. Unfortunately, Wearing the Lion had its moments, but turned out to be a Greek myth retelling that was sanitized in all the wrong places.

Enjoy this week’s review!

Wearing the Lion – John Wiswell

Hera has another son, and she despises him.

Born out of wedlock, her distant son Heracles proves to be stronger—and more devoted—than the average human. He thwarts every attempt by Hera to kill him, and grows up to have godlike strength. All he wants is for Hera to answer his prayers, but Hera wants nothing to do with him. But as Hera’s mounting, seemingly impossible challenges stack against him, endangering his family and relationships, Heracles wants answers. And he’ll do anything to find out why Hera doesn’t love him, despite all of his devotion to the mother he never met.

TW/CW: grief, child death, loss of loved ones, violence, birth/pregnancy, descriptions of injury, animal cruelty, war

To give you an idea of my experience reading Wearing the Lion, let’s consider the best scene in the book. It reminded me of why I loved John Wiswell’s debut, Someone You Can Build a Nest In. About a third of the way through the novel, Heracles wrestles the infamous Nemean lion. In the throes of battle, the lion’s claws pierce Heracles’s skin, and as they’re locked together, the pinprick of the claws remind Heracles of the embrace of his dead son, who was cursed by the gods to have lion-like features. It’s a harrowing scene. It’s written with such startling humanity, but it also works on its own as a kind of thesis for Wiswell’s interpretation of Heracles as a more empathetic hero who goes to the lengths he does because he fundamentally just wants love and is willing to find it in unexpected places. So he doesn’t kill the Nemean Lion, and it becomes his companion.

Then he names it Purrseus.

Wham. Just like that, all of the emotional impact gets deadened. It’s symptomatic of a larger problem with the novel, which is that the narrative voice was insufferable. The overwhelming feeling that I got was that it felt like the product of a millennial who watched Disney’s version of Hercules one too many times as a child. The narrative voice of both Hera, Heracles, and the other characters was in that overly “quirky” style that tries too hard to be witty by sprinkling in a weird mixture of terrible puns and improperly-placed swearing so that you know that it has a sense of humor, but it’s also adult! Ooh, I’m so edgy, here’s Hera calling Zeus her “dipshit husband” for the millionth time! (Not that the label wasn’t earned for Zeus, to be fair.) Heracles is the most precious cinnamon roll who must be protected at all costs! Why does the Hydra talk like they’re trapped in a Tumblr post circa 2012? It made me wonder if this was really the same author as Someone You Can Build a Nest In, because this writing style was nothing short of grating.

Unfortunately, my issues come back to Heracles being an alleged precious cinnamon roll who can do no wrong. “They woobified Heracles” is an unholy sentence that I wish that I never had to write, but it’s pretty much exactly what happened in Wearing the Lion. I’m not even that familiar with the original myth, but even here, I can see that this is an unnecessarily sanitized interpretation. In attempting to create a more sympathetic view of the character (not that his reputation was all that tarnished in the first place), Wiswell erased most of his flaws. He’s human, of course—Wiswell didn’t hold back in depicting Heracles in the throes of his grief—but every hint of a flaw that comes up is easily smoothed over. Any hint of wrongdoing on Heracles’s part got hastily justified in service of making him “sympathetic.” I’ll eat up found family any day of the week, but there was so little differentiation or conflict—even minor arguments—between Heracles and his motley crew. He just became a Disney Princess with a bunch of monsters following him through the woods on his wacky little quest. Effectively, he becomes exactly what Wiswell doesn’t want Heracles to be: infallible and perfect. It just made Wearing the Lion fundamentally less interesting, knowing that anything bad that Heracles did would inevitably not be his fault.

That being said, Wearing the Lion at least had the seeds of something good. Though it wasn’t executed as well as it could’ve been, I liked that it became a story of breaking the cycle of trauma; in Wiswell’s interpretation, both Hera and Heracles had been dually traumatized by their circumstances, but they were both entwined in a chain of hurt that, naturally, led back to Zeus sleeping around and not considering the consequences. Though overburdened by its grating voice, the manifestations of Hera and Heracles’s trauma were unique to them, and the ways that this trauma evolved and informed their characters was actually quite touching. Of course, it was wrapped up too neatly for my liking, but I kind of expected that from this novel. For all its flaws, Wearing the Lion set out to be a very human novel, and in some places, it succeeded.

All in all, a retelling of Greek mythology that sought to shed new light on its protagonist, but sanitized him instead. Without the Nemean Lion scene, I definitely would’ve rated it lower. 3.5 stars.

Wearing the Lion is a standalone, but John Wiswell is also the author of Someone You Can Build a Nest In and The Dragon Has Some Complaints.

Today’s song:

That’s it for this week’s Book Review Tuesday! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!

Posted in Book Review Tuesday

Book Review Tuesday (7/21/26) – Field Guide for the Formerly Villainous

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!

I hate to say it, but while Amie Kaufman has never let me down with her books, her book recommendations are less reliable. That’s how I found out about Field Guide for the Formerly Villainous, but to be fair, I’ve been reading and enjoying Autumn K. England/M.K. England’s books since I was in high school. They’ve never been a favorite or auto-buy author for me, but their books have been consistently solid and enjoyable in a pinch. Unfortunately, their cozy adult debut is their weakest novel to date.

Enjoy this week’s review!

Field Guide for the Formerly Villainous – Autumn K. England

Oaklin Nettlewood is turning over a new leaf. After narrowly escaping from a magical cult, Oaklin has fled to the small town of Mossley’s Rest. In a fit of desperation, they buy a farm, not knowing that its former occupant was a beloved staple in the town before her death. Her ghost lingers in the barn, and she’s bent on helping Oaklin revive the farm in earnest. But between painful flashbacks, suspicious townsfolk, and Oaklin’s self-imposed barriers, will they ever be able to start over?

TW/CW: panic attacks, mental illness themes, past descriptions of murder/violence, substance abuse

I wasn’t a massive fan of England’s books before, but they were consistently entertaining, which is why I’ve kept reading them. This might be where I break up with them. I should’ve seen the red flags when this was compared to Can’t Spell Treason Without Tea, which I rated too generously in retrospect. Field Guide for the Formerly Villainous was largely bland, and when it wasn’t bland, it was grating; there are so many ways to make cozy genre fiction compelling, and England used none of them.

Field Guide for the Formerly Villainous did have a prominently good aspect; it’s not just a matter of “the main character is disabled/mentally ill and that’s cool,” but England’s depiction of Oaklin’s PTSD was so empathetic. England did an excellent job of writing all of the facets of Oaklin’s trauma and mental illness. No punches were pulled with the depictions of their violent flashbacks, and their frequent panic attacks and harshly critical inner monologue were treated with the appropriate balance of sympathy and authenticity—unlike some other parts of the book, none of it felt sanitized, which I appreciated. It didn’t just feel like representation for representation’s sake—it felt like a genuine attempt to humanize a mental illness that’s quite stigmatized.

I’m not sure if I was just able to pass over the flaws in England’s novels in high school because I wasn’t super discerning or if Field Guide for the Formerly Villainous is just their worst novel. Whatever the case, one of the biggest weaknesses of this novel was just how downright bland it is. I hate to say this, but I genuinely can’t think of a single unique quality that England’s writing has. There were a few nicely flowery metaphors here and there, but it just felt devoid of any individuality. The bucolic setting was described at the barest minimum, as were the relationships between Oaklin and the others. I wasn’t expecting a worldbuilding marvel, or anything, but any sense of the world beyond the absolute bare minimum was missing. England’s writing style was just exceedingly nothing. This was certainly a book. With words in it.

I was hoping that England’s characters and dialogue would pick up the slack that the boring writing left off. Unfortunately, that was not the case. Apart from Oaklin, who was decently written, and Granny (whose main distinguishing factors were that she was a ghost and had the mannerisms of an old lady), the supporting characters were lazy copy and pastes of each other. Looking back, the only thing that distinguished Lior from the others was that she was [checks notes] an attractive woman who had a different job from the others. Ryn and Jules were the exact same character. (I think one of them plays guitar? That’s all that distinguishes them.) But what really exacerbated this issue was that all of their dialogue sounded the same. To make matters worse, they all had these very modern, gratingly “quirky” mannerisms that felt like some insufferable person’s DnD campaign. For all the effort that England put into making the people of Mossley’s Rest seem like the kind of small town folk that you’d be comfortable being neighbors with, I just wanted to leave as soon as possible.

An extension of this character issue came in the form of the romance. I liked the setup of Oaklin and Lior’s relationship, but none of it felt earned. From the start, I knew that they would end up together. That in and of itself wasn’t the problem; the problem was that their romantic progression felt so fast and unearned. So much of how their relationship developed fell into the many timeskips throughout the novel, leaving what we had on the page insufficient. It just lacked tension. In cozy genre fiction of any kind, romance is a great way to introduce an element of low-stakes tension without making the novel overly tense. Here, it was just insta-love, and wholly unearned. The only real barriers were Oaklin’s past identity and their conflicting professions, both of which got smoothed over pretty quickly. I do like that Lior was able to accept Oaklin in spite of their past, but it just felt like it robbed the book of some fluffier tension that it very much needed.

That being said, I will say that, in spite of not enjoying myself throughout most of Field Guide for the Formerly Villainous, I did love the ending. It’s messier than a lot of cozy fantasies like it are willing to get, and the biggest takeaway is that Oaklin is fundamentally deserving of love in spite of their past, which they had no control over. Yes, it was a little sappy, but I always appreciate narratives about the harsh criticism that characters have about themselves being proven wrong. England stuck the landing, but it wasn’t enough to save the whole novel.

All in all, a cozy fantasy that was forgettable in all senses of the word. 2.25 stars.

Field Guide for the Formerly Villainous is the first novel in the Everyday Magic series, but no sequels have been announced yet. Autumn K. England (also writing as M.K. England) is also the author of several other books for teens and adults, including The Disasters, Spellhacker, Roll for Love, All Fired Up, and many others.

Today’s song:

NEW CHELSEA WOLFE ALBUM IN AUGUST, THIS IS NOT A DRILL!!

That’s it for this week’s Book Review Tuesday! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!

Posted in Book Review Tuesday

Book Review Tuesday (7/14/26) – Machine (White Space, #2)

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!

Thankfully, after last week’s disappointment, we’ve got something to save the track record for Disability Pride Month. I started Elizabeth Bear’s White Space trilogy earlier this year, and I knew I wanted a physical copy of book 2. It’s one of the great joys in life when a sequel is better than the first book—and Ancestral Night was already a 4.5-star read for me, so this was huge! Machine was a fantastic step up for a series that’s already a cut above the rest.

Enjoy this week’s review!

Machine (White Space, #2) – Elizabeth Bear

Dr. Brookllyn Jens is a special kind of doctor. Her patients are usually aliens, and her status as an emergency specialist means that her job description tends to involve having to jump out of spaceships. It’s already a job that keeps her on the edge. But when Dr. Jens and her crew discover two ships that have been abandoned for thousands of years, they uncover a mystery with layers upon layers of disastrous implications. With a strange, antiquated AI, an entire human crew in cryosleep, and a potential conspiracy on their hands, Dr. Jens and her crew must race against the clock to make sure that everybody makes it out alive.

TW/CW: ableism, misogyny, medical content, xenophobia, violence, murder

Genuinely, my sole problem with this novel is the title. Elizabeth Bear thought out this intricate and complex space opera world full of thousands of aliens and unique space travel, and couldn’t think of a more memorable title than Machine? I mean, yeah. There sure are Machines. Lots of ’em. But come on, really.

As much as I enjoyed Haimey’s story in Ancestral Night, I really think that making the White Space series several collected companion novels was the right move. It expands the intricate world that Elizabeth Bear has crafted in so many exciting ways that were only possible through the eyes of a different cast of characters. I loved the ways that the Synarche and all of the different species within it were fleshed out. Bear’s writing is as sharp as ever—her voice is so witty and hilarious, but she also knows just how to stick the landing when it comes to the more climactic or serious moments. The pacing was top-notch, especially considering that Machine is nearly 500 pages long—I blew through hundreds of pages at a time, and Bear never lost me.

I absolutely adored Dr. Jens as a protagonist, and Bear’s willingness to let her protagonists be messy yet lovable people made her shine. Dr. Jens has such a dry sense of humor, and her wry observations about the world around her made Machine such an entertaining read. But beyond that, I loved her continuous self-reflection—about the ideas she’s constructed about herself, but also about her work and the world around her. The supporting cast was so vibrant and lovable—it was a treat to see Cheerilaq again, first off, but all of the characters were so delightful and added a real human (and syster) authenticity to Core General’s staff. Sometimes your coworker gets on your nerves for no discernible reason, and they’re also a massive cetacean-like being getting wheeled around in a massive tank. On that subject, I loved all of the new Systers that Bear introduces. My creature design brain predictably became that meme of the dog with the propeller beanie and the giant lollipop seeing all of the truly alien aliens that populated the Synarche. But Bear went beyond good creature design and into crafting memorable, multilayered characters, which is what makes her space opera stand out in the end.

In particular, the expansion of the AI and robots in the Synarche was one of the most intriguing aspects of the world that Bear discusses in Machine. The whole plotline with Helen Alloy was one of the most well-executed. I love how Bear interrogates the objectification of women and how sci-fi has historically translated this into female-presenting robots. The visceral discomfort that Dr. Jens has that Helen was specifically created to have a hypersexualized, feminine form felt was like seeing the sun peer through the clouds after decades of weird men writing all kinds of messed-up sex-bots. It’s treated with the appropriate level of disgust—both on Helen and Dr. Jens’s part. Helen’s manipulation also ends up being vital to the later twist, and her entire arc of deconstructing the lies that she was programmed with was handled with such tenderness. Beyond the robots, I think that thread of treating people who have been brought up with hateful ideologies and not immediately dismissing those with different opinions was one of the best aspects of Machine; Bear’s insistence that people—human, alien, or AI—are not inherently bad, only victims of harmful ideas, was so necessary.

Bear’s take on disability in a sci-fi context was also such a respectful and well-researched one! She listed off several sensitivity readers in the acknowledgements, and their work paid off—for someone who seems to be non-disabled, by all accounts, this might be one of the most caring representations of a disabled person and their struggles in sci-fi I’ve seen by a non-disabled author. Dr. Jens has a chronic pain disorder, and she has a special exo-suit that manages some of her pain, but not all of it—sci-fi tech still has limitations in the far, far future. She still aches and gets physically taxed from her daring missions. Granted, I’m not chronically ill, but it felt like Bear paid so much attention to how Dr. Jens’s symptoms would present and how her high-stakes profession would affect it. Additionally, there’s a lot of talk about how disability is handled in the future; there was lots of discussion of “rightminding,” a process that, among other things, mitigates the effects of some mental illnesses. It would’ve been so easy to just slap it on as a cure-all technology, but Bear’s approach was one that I rarely see in sci-fi. It’s not necessarily “disability isn’t cured,” but it’s handled on a case-by-case basis, there’s an understanding that different kinds of disabled people have different needs and opinions about how they want to live with their disabilities with the technology available. This rejection of the one-size-fits-all approach to disability was a breath of fresh air, and wasn’t afraid to get into the nuance of how disabled people live their lives.

Disability wasn’t the only issue that gets dealt with in a refreshing amount of nuance. Bear was not afraid to get into the weeds with this novel, and it made my reading experience so much better. Machine, more so than its predecessor, gets into how a utopia and utopian ideas can be twisted into something sinister. It all feels very Ursula K. LeGuin—the Synarche is without a doubt an ambiguous utopia like The Dispossessed. (First off, I liked that Bear interrogates the ethics of “rightminding” targeting potentially “dangerous ideologies,” and how that ends up being decidedly non-utopian.) I appreciated that Bear discusses how well-intentioned utopias can be co-opted into vehicles for hatred, but also how that revelation wracks the people who genuinely believed in this utopia—people like Dr. Jens. Her arc in having faith in her hospital and the Synarche was so human—her entire reality and faith in the organization she devoted her life to is messily upended. But the realization that she comes to—that you can take the good work you wanted to do and the faith in your fellow people outside of corrupt organizations and do your own work—was one that feels so vital. I also loved the thematic potential of the infectious meme—not unlike the spread of a hateful ideology—that is treated as an infection that has to be weaned out with attention and care. Bear’s depictions of that crushing realization and how Dr. Jens and her coworkers pick up the pieces was so heartfelt, and a very potent message in this day and age.

All in all, a spectacular companion to Ancestral Night that expanded Elizabeth Bear’s masterfully crafted space opera universe with pulse-pounding action and heart. 5 stars!

Machine is the second book in the White Space trilogy, a series of companion novels set in the same universe; it is also includes Ancestral Night (book 1) and Folded Sky (book 3). Elizabeth Bear is also the author of several other series, including the New Amsterdam series (New Amsterdam, Seven for a Secret, The White City, Ad Eternum, and Garrett Investigates), the Jacob’s Ladder trilogy (Dust, Sanction, and Grail) and many others

Today’s song:

still going through my mom’s records from the ’80s. this remains peak.

That’s it for this week’s Book Review Tuesday! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!

Posted in Book Review Tuesday

Book Review Tuesday (7/7/26) – Climate of Chaos

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!

I wanted to kick off Disability Pride Month with something positive, but unfortunately, I don’t think that it’ll be the case. Whoops. They can’t all be bangers. I was intrigued by the concept of Climate of Chaos, and excited by the premise of a disabled main character navigating a dystopian world. Unfortunately, Climate of Chaos was not the Hunger Games successor that it purported itself to be.

Enjoy this week’s review!

Climate of Chaos – Cassandra Newbould

Fox LaRosa lives in the climate-ravaged wilderness of what was once Seattle. While the rich get to live in luxurious, climate-proof domes made by the infamous Aegis Corp, people like Fox and her sister Rabbit live on the edge of death—made worse by the mounting medical debt that Fox has been carrying ever since she became disabled. To make matters worse, a strange new virus is creeping its way up north, and if it hits Fox and her commune, it could spell disaster. But when Rabbit is kidnapped on a routine heist for medical supplies, Fox must fight her way into the rotten heart of Aegis Corp in order to find her sister—and figure out what Aegis wants with her.

TW/CW: medical trauma, violence, pandemic/epidemic, ableism, loss of loved ones, police brutality, loss of loved ones

The other day, I was watching BookLeo’s retrospective on the YA dystopian craze of the late 2000’s-early 2010’s, and she mentioned that one the most common plot elements throughout the books is that the inciting incident is that the protagonist has to find their missing sibling. I never even considered that, but it’s everywhere. If anything, Climate of Chaos is proof that the trope is alive and kicking today. It’s a foolproof inciting incident. Pour one out for all of the missing brothers and sisters that get put through the wringer for the plot in YA dystopias.

As a whole, I was disappointed by Climate of Chaos, but I’d like to acknowledge the positives, because there were some great aspects of this novel. We’re at least a decade out from the huge wave of Hunger Games copycats, but the issue that a lot of people had with them was that their dystopian worlds tended to be removed from real forms of oppression and didn’t make sense. Climate of Chaos, however, grounds its dystopia in two very real-world issues: climate change and medical debt. Newbould did an excellent job of going into all manner of ways that climate change could negatively impact our world in the future, from the more obvious weather changes to the spread of new diseases, the latter of which becomes very relevant to the plot. The discussions around medical debt and the poor treatment of disabled people under our healthcare system were very timely, and it pointed out that conditions for many disabled people are as dystopian today as they are in this fictional, far-flung future. And while I had my issues with Fox as a character, it’s so wonderful to see a disabled girl kicking butt in a YA book like this. Her cane being able to extend out of her belt and fold back into itself was indisputably badass, as was the fact that the cane had an extendable blade at the end.

Aside from those points, Climate of Chaos was unfortunately weak. There was some serious work that needed to be done with the characters. I hate to say it, but I think the only reason that Fox stands out from other teen dystopian protagonists is the fact that she’s disabled. Her entire personality is that unnecessarily gritty, edgy persona that you get when you’re trying to make a character sound “hardened,” to the point that it was overexaggerated. Half of her dialogue sounded straight out of Zack Snyder’s DC movies. It got old quickly. Apart from that, most of the characters were hardly characterized beyond a few base traits, and some—even the main characters—were only distinguished by the fact that Fox is friends with them. Cely at least had a distinct personality, but Asher and Eamon, despite being some of the central characters, didn’t get much beyond “boys who are friends with Fox.” Towards the end, there was also a faint indication that Asher and Fox had some sort of romantic chemistry, which felt forced, but more importantly, completely unearned—their relationship is a complete plateau from the beginning to the end of the book, and there was nothing that convinced me that there was any sort of romance brewing between them. It was all just the absolute bare minimum of character work.

The worldbuilding was largely hit or miss. I think Newbould did a decent job of establishing how the world (particularly Seattle) got to where it is in Climate of Chaos, and the structure of the different rungs of society made sense. The themes of inequality between disabled people and poor people were the only things keeping Aegis Corp from falling into the “the government is bad, but we’re not going to tell you anything except for that it’s bad” trap, but it was pretty close. Without spoiling, I think the reveal about Aegis Corp and the Vi (yes, that’s what they call the virus 🫩 peak YA dystopian cornball terminology lives, folks) was the most nonsensical part of the plot; with the established plot about the Harvest House, I feel like that erased all of the rationale for why Aegis Corp used the Vi in the way they did. At a certain point, there’s things that don’t even make sense for a comically mustache-twirling fictional government to do, just because the stuff that they’re doing would be such an unnecessary and unjustifiable drain on their resources.

Ultimately, I think the biggest issue with Climate of Chaos was that I never once felt like Fox or any of the other main characters were truly in danger. Despite them undergoing the notoriously dangerous Storm Runner trials with a ridiculously slim survival rate, all of the main characters came out without a scratch. Seriously! The main characters had a laughable amount of plot armor, and after about the halfway point, I just gave up on caring about any of them—Fox, Asher, Eamon, Cely, Trew, and all of the other main characters are completely fine, even though they’ve been exposed to a deadly virus, been in danger of being killed by their bloodthirsty teammates, and were almost gunned down by their Storm Runner superiors. Eamon is inside a factory that nearly explodes, and he comes out unscathed…give me a break. It just reeked of Newbould liking them too much and refusing to let any of them even get the smallest scrape on their knees. I didn’t even care that Fox had been taken to the Harvest House, because I knew by then that she’d come out the other side completely fine—and guess what? SHE DID. Along with the worldbuilding, this is what made me lose faith that any of the characters were actually in danger in this supposedly dystopian world.

A related sidenote: I don’t have chronic pain, so take this with a grain of salt, but other than Fox having to use her cane in a few situations, wouldn’t she be in excruciating pain during something as taxing as the Storm Runner trials? It’d be exhausting even for a nondisabled person. Granted, I remember an instance of her sneaking painkillers, but I feel like even that wouldn’t erase the pain of having to fight a bunch of other teenagers to the death day-in and day-out.

All in all, a YA dystopia that had its heart in the right place, but failed to make its dystopian world fully believable. 2.5 stars.

Climate of Chaos is a standalone, but Cassandra Newbould is also the author of Things I’ll Never Say and the editor of the anthology Every Body Shines: Sixteen Stories about Living Fabulously Fat.

Today’s song:

That’s it for this week’s Book Review Tuesday! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!

Posted in Books

♿️ The Bookish Mutant’s Books for Disability Pride Month (2026 Edition) ♿️

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Monday, bibliophiles!

Here in the U.S., July is Disability Pride Month! It seems like every year, representation—and all-around recognition—for disabled people only progresses by millimeters. Time and time again, it’s left on the back burner by so-called intersectional activists, continually ignored from unaccommodating public education to inaccessible infrastructure in the biggest cities and the smallest towns. It’s gotten bleaker still with the damaging rhetoric spread by R.F.K. Junior and by the Trump administration at large. And we’ve somehow let the r-word insidiously creep back into common use. I feel like it’s relevant that when I was in high school, I frequently heard people call their phones “autistic” when they were broken or not working—2019 wasn’t as long as ago as people would like to think. Dehumanizing disabled people has always been baked deep into the roots of our language and slang—and yet it’s so easy to just switch words around.

In short, the world hasn’t exactly gotten kinder to any of us in the disabled community. But recently my best friend sent me this hilarious (and wonderful) reel, and it reminded me of the endurance of our community:

Yes, this is totally goofy. But it’s true. Despite all of the rampant campaigns to dehumanize and outright eradicate disabled people in all aspects of life, we are still here. The disabled community is as diverse as our struggles, but we have weathered all of them. There are countless issues that we have to face, in the highest forms of government and even in the simple ways we interact with friends and strangers. But if there’s one thing that the disabled community has done, it is endure—and endurance is nothing without community. The strength of our community is what has allowed us to create a more accessible world, little by little, and it is the key for making the world a kinder and more accessible place to be.

Also, four years out from my installation of this post where I talked about the absolute dearth of SPD representation out there (see 2022 in the “previous lists” section below), I’ve finally read one more book with a main character with SPD. Halfway through 2026, and it was one of the best books I’ve read this year by a long shot. Thank you, Jamie Sumner. Representation matters. 🩵

NOTE: my memory (and the internet) is imperfect, so if I’ve misrepresented/mislabeled any of the specific rep in these books, don’t hesitate to let me know!

KEY FOR TERMS IN THIS POST:

  • MC: Main character
  • LI: Love interest
  • SC: Side character

For my previous lists, click below: 

Let’s begin, shall we?

♿️ THE BOOKISH MUTANT’S BOOKS FOR DISABILITY PRIDE MONTH (2026 EDITION) ♿️

FANTASY:

SCIENCE FICTION:

REALISTIC/HISTORICAL FICTION:

*the POV character in Pod is a dolphin, but I feel that the representation still counts.

NONFICTION:

TELL ME WHAT YOU THINK! Have you read any of the books on this list? What are your favorite books with disability rep? Let me know in the comments!

Today’s song:

THIS JUST IN, ROLE MODEL HERMIT IS A BANGER

That’s it for this post! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!

Posted in Book Review Tuesday

Book Review Tuesday (4/14/26) – Tune It Out

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!

Alright, let’s do this one last time.

My name is Madeline. I was diagnosed with SPD at age three, and I’ve talked about it fairly extensively on this blog, often in relation to what I usually talk about on here: books and music. Current research gives the estimate that around 1 in 20 people has some form of SPD, but it’s rarely talked about—much less depicted in pop culture. The representation of it in literature (and every other kind of media) is almost nonexistent. I’ve had the privilege of meeting more people with SPD in college, and that’s made me much less isolated and more confident. Nonetheless, the conversation around SPD tends to amount to crickets. Thankfully, progress in representation has inched forward. Last year, we got the documentary Sensory Overload, which was an excellent and intersectional window into all kinds of people with sensory issues, including SPD—I highly recommend it.

But until I read this novel, I’d only heard of one other fiction book on the subject (Carolyn Mackler’s Not If I Can Help It, which I also highly recommend), and that book only came out in 2019. So you can see why I grew up feeling more than a little alienated.

I rarely get excited to hear about books from authors I’ve never even heard of. But the minute that I found out that Tune It Out had SPD representation, I was itching to read it. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find it at the library or any bookstores for six years. So I had a little celebration when my library got a copy of it on Libby! I don’t even care that I’ve aged well past the middle grade target audience, because Tune It Out provided something for me that I’ve been searching for all my life.

Enjoy this week’s review!

Tune It Out – Jamie Sumner

As far as Lou Montgomery is concerned, she’s getting along just fine. Sure, she and her mother may be unhoused, but despite Lou’s intense aversion to crowds and loud noises, she’s been able to function, trying to get noticed by a talent scout so that her mother can finally get the big break they’ve always dreamed of. But when an incident leads to Lou being separated from her mom by CPS, she’s forced into an entirely new life—one with school, new people, and all sorts of sounds that she doesn’t like. What’s more, she finally has a name for her feelings—SPD. Lou isn’t sure if she likes it. But as Lou comes to face the facts about herself, her mother, and her new life, she realizes that finding her voice may not be as hard as she thought.

TW/CW: child neglect/abuse, ableism, panic attacks/sensory overload, car accident

Here’s the thing. I’ve gotten emotional over representation of all kinds. Seeing my experiences of being bisexual, mixed-race, and/or the general experience of being a woman have all touched me in ways that most books don’t. For SPD, it’s different. I was full on sobbing in my bed reading Tune It Out, because so few books—and any other kind of media—have addressed this part of me. I am so beyond glad that Tune It Out exists.

First, the obvious: the SPD representation! That was the entire reason I picked up Tune It Out, and I saw so much of myself in Lou. SPD is a varied diagnosis, but a lot of Lou’s symptoms were similar to mine, particularly her heightened sensitivity to sound. Her experience going to the airport for the first time, as well as the fire drill scene, really hammered home how harrowing sensory sensitivity is—every sound feels like an attack on you, and you feel that attack become pain in your body. Her aversion to touch and certain textures hit home too, especially with unwanted physical contact. Sumner’s prose made these sensations so embodied. Also, the scene where she gets an iPod for the first time and is able to use music to self-soothe truly struck me. I’ve still got my beat-up iPod nano from when I was about Lou’s age, and it serves the same purpose to this day. It’s a part of having SPD that’s always been a reliable way to help me calm down from sensory overload, and I loved that Sumner explored this in Tune It Out. I saw so much of my younger self in Lou. Sumner clearly did her homework in that regard, and I can’t thank her enough for that.

Another aspect of SPD representation that Tune It Out touches on is occupational therapy. Lou was diagnosed at an older age than I was, but the questionnaires and coping mechanisms that she learns at school were very accurate to my experience with SPD and therapy. A lot of the new challenges she faces at school, from crowded cafeterias to fire drills, were appropriately shocking to her (with the combined factor of her being formerly unhoused and not used to this particular school environment), and I loved how she learned to cope with these everyday struggles. I also appreciate that Sumner introduced the perspective of Lou having some internalized ableism; a lot of her mom’s beliefs about her “just being skittish” and that she could just “tough it out” without a problem were deeply embedded in her own belief system, which made her very reluctant to get diagnosed. Lou’s arc about realizing that SPD is nothing to be ashamed of and learning to cope with sensory issues in healthy ways resonated with me deeply, and I’m sure it will with so many other readers.

Tune It Out deals with some heavy topics, but I think it does it in a way that makes it perfect for older middle grade readers. One of the main conflicts of the book is that Lou is being controlled by her neglectful, manipulative mother; one of the main realizations that she has is that her mom has been using her singing talents to try and get them money, and she refuses to acknowledge that a) her daughter’s dreams are not her own, and b) her daughter isn’t just “skittish,” but has a disability that is not being properly accommodated. It’s definitely an older middle grade subject to realize that your parent might be emotionally abusive, but the way that Sumner handled it gave it the weight it deserves. Lou idolized her mother for so long, but she reacted exactly how I would imagine a 12-year-old would. It’s a difficult read in those portions, but I think it’s an important subject for younger readers to be exposed to.

In terms of the lighter, more classic middle school parts of the plot, Tune It Out reminded me of some of my favorite middle grade novels that I read in elementary and middle school. I loved the scenes with Lou and her new friends, especially Well, who read delightfully like a Wes Anderson character. The scenes of them bonding over music made me bawl. Lou’s fears about her new friends were relatable, but all of them coming together to support Lou taking control of her own narrative were so heartwarming. Sumner really captured that feeling of being in middle school and being fundamentally different from your classmates in a way that shook me to my core.

Ultimately, I think Lou’s arc in Tune It Out was incredibly powerful. Given that so many narratives about disability lean into “inspiration” plots, I think it’s so potent that Lou’s arc centers around her gaining autonomy over her life. She finally works up the courage to stand up to her neglectful, emotionally abusive mother—that scene was one of the most poignant in the book. But I think that the core of Lou’s arc—her life being controlled, and then her gaining control over her life—is so important for young, neurodivergent girls to hear. Honestly, it works for all kinds of young girls. When you’re neurodivergent and/or a girl, so many people will try to tell you how to live your life, and being told from a young age that you are the only one in charge of your story is something that needs to be heard and reinforced. My hope is that young girls will learn that from Lou, and I have no doubt that they will. I needed a Lou when I was 12, but I’m just glad that the generations of girls to come will have a Lou of their own.

All in all, Tune It Out was easy to love: full of heart, charm, and just the sort of representation that I’ve been searching for ever since I knew about the concept of representation. Thank you, Jamie Sumner. Representation matters. 5 stars!

Tune It Out is a standalone, but Jamie Sumner is the author of several other books for children, including Roll With It, The Summer of June, Glory Be, Please Pay Attention, and more.

Today’s song:

That’s it for this week’s Book Review Tuesday! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!

Posted in Books

The Bookish Mutant’s Books for Autism Acceptance Month (2026 Edition) ♾️🌈

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Monday, bibliophiles!

Here in the U.S., April is Autism Acceptance Month! Unfortunately, I’ve only done one of these recommendations lists in the past (April is usually a very busy month for me), but I figured I would make another, because like many of the other marginalized identities that the Trump administration has been going after, the autistic community, especially here in the States, has been under attack. RFK Jr. has repeatedly made claims that he will “cure autism” (as if it even needs to be cured in the first place) and has spread all sorts of harmful and baseless misinformation about autism and autistic people. What most of it boils down to is the concept that autism—and neurodivergence in general—is somehow a tragedy.

The truth is much more nuanced. While it isn’t a superpower, as some people try to sugarcoat it, autism is not a tragedy, and autistic people’s lives, experiences, and stories are worth celebrating. That’s what I hope to do with this list: here, we have narratives in many different genres about autistic people being the autonomous heroes in their own stories. And just like the experiences of autistic people, no two are completely alike—it is a spectrum, after all, and a multitude of experiences.

And because it’s evergreen (and relatable as a neurodivergent person), here’s this clip of Fern Brady on how people talk about autism:

For my list of recommendations from 2023, click here.

Also, if you’d like an opportunity to find even more books with autism rep, Ada Hoffmann (whose books I included on my last list) has compiled an exhaustive repository of them!

NOTE: most of these novels have explicit autistic representation, but some of them (The Book Eaters, A Big Ship at the Edge of the Universe, etc.) do not have autistic representation, but are written by autistic authors; I chose to include them, as this post is meant to uplift autistic authors and characters. Additionally, there are several books that aren’t directly focused on autism, but on disability in general, but still have contributions/stories from autistic authors, which I thought merited inclusion as well.

Let’s begin, shall we?

THE BOOKISH MUTANT’S BOOKS FOR AUTISM ACCEPTANCE MONTH (2026 EDITION)

SCIENCE FICTION:

FANTASY:

REALISTIC AND HISTORICAL FICTION:

NONFICTION:

TELL ME WHAT YOU THINK! Have you read any of these books, and if so, what did you think of them? What are some of your favorite books by autistic authors? Let me know in the comments!

Today’s song:

I haven’t thought about this song in ages…

That’s it for this week’s recommendations list! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!

Posted in Book Review Tuesday

Book Review Tuesday (2/24/26) – Every Variable of Us

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!

I’ve read a lot of great books this month, but a lot of the ones I’ve read recently are sequels to books that I haven’t reviewed, so it feels weird to review a book 2 or 3 when I haven’t even review book 1. Hence why there have been more negative reviews this month. However, I do feel like I have to get my feelings about Every Variable of Us off my chest, because it promised something so positive, but crashed in burned in so many ways. It was a sore disappointment for sure.

Enjoy this week’s review!

Every Variable of Us – Charles A. Bush

Alexis Duncan loves basketball—and she’s counting on it to get her the scholarship she needs to escape her impoverished neighborhood and turbulent home life. But when she’s injured in a shooting and can no longer play basketball, her dreams are crushed. With no other option, she turns to Aamani, the new student in her school. Aamani encourages Alexis to join their school’s STEM team to get the scholarship she needs. Alexis is skeptical—she knows nothing about the sport, and she’s reluctant to fit in with the nerdier crowd. But as her skills—and her confusing crush on Aamani—develop, Alexis realizes that there may be more to her than meets the eye.

TW/CW: racism, gun violence, homophobia, Islamophobia, xenophobia, ableism (internalized/external), drug abuse/addiction themes, mentions of child abuse

I’m a little ashamed to be giving this novel such a negative review, but I firmly believe that negative reviews have their place. This novel was clearly a labor of love for Bush, being a debut novel about a queer, Black, and disabled girl, a story that’s exceedingly difficult to get out there in this climate. There’s probably some kids out there who think that this is just the book for them. Without a doubt, Every Variable of Us is an important book to have out there. But I think there’s a lot of valid criticism to be had for this novel, and it’s important to note that a book being diverse doesn’t absolve flaws in its writing…of which this novel had many.

In theory, I think Alexis is a great character to have for a YA audience; there’s this expectation in the genre that even your characters can’t be flawed in terms of their worldview, because that might be “problematic.” It’s good for teens to see a character that starts off narrow-minded and comes out the other side more tolerant or understanding. I tried to roll with Alexis’s inner monologue with that in mind. There’s a lot that you have to put up with—in the beginning of the book, Alexis is…practically everything-phobic: Islamophobic, racist towards other minorities, fatphobic, homophobic, and ableist. There’s a clear setup for her to learn from her mistakes and be more understanding of other people’s cultures, and in turn, accept her own status as a disabled, bisexual person. However, there doesn’t end up being much development on her part, when both the novel and the marketing want us to believe that she undergoes this dramatic arc and becomes a whole new person. Alexis becomes more tolerant towards queerness and Aamani’s Indian heritage and traditions, but save for that (and her success in becoming an asset to the STEM team and getting a scholarship), her arc is practically a straight line. Her lack of self-reflection wouldn’t have been a problem if Bush wanted the reader so badly to think that she’d magically changed into a better person, when in reality, she was in a very similar place to where she was at the beginning of the novel. I’m all for flawed characters, but don’t tell me that a character’s had this monumental shift in her worldview when she really hasn’t.

Which brings me to the complicated issue of the diversity of this book. I really appreciate that Bush put a lot of effort into making Every Variable of Us have a diverse cast. However, a lot of the diverse characters ended up feeling like props to reinforce lessons for Alexis about being tolerant about other marginalized people. To be fair, Aamani had more development than the rest, but there were moments when she was clearly only there to teach Alexis about Indian people and Hindu traditions, as well as queerness. It was more blatantly evident in characters like Matthew; I appreciated the note at the beginning where Bush acknowledged that he’s not autistic and wanted to represent autism as respectfully as possible. I can’t speak to the autism rep specifically, but as a neurodivergent person, I found Matthew to be decently represented. That being said, it very much felt like he was there just so that he could challenge Alexis’s ableist worldview. At a certain point, I could see the checklist in Bush’s head: “oh, wait! Maybe we can add an Asian character here, jot that down!” Diversity can only be successful when its intent is to provide representation of minorities, but also minorities as people, not teaching moments for the main character; otherwise, it becomes disingenuous. Every Variable of Us unfortunately fell straight into this trap.

I’ve talked about this with several YA books, but there’s a very vocal camp in the YA world that’s staunchly against pop culture references in the story. I’ve never really understood the argument—why not have your characters engage with media that current teenagers like and/or that you liked as a teenager? Why not have something that a teenager can relate to or be introduced to because of this book? However, there is very much a wrong way to do it, and that’s to cram every possible reference into the narrative for no reason. Dear Wendy is another example where that approach nosedived (too many references, not enough actual story), but it pains me to say that Every Variable of Us is also a masterclass on how not to write pop culture references into the narrative. Every other sentence had a reference. Even when I was Alexis’s age, and deeply, deeply nerdy (especially about some of the same things that Aamani is passionate about, namely Marvel comics), my inner and outer monologue didn’t contain an Avengers reference every 10 seconds. It got to such a ridiculous point—nobody, not even nerdy people, talks like that at all. As a result, almost all of the characters ceased to become real to me. People just do not speak like that. It’s like Bush was trying to relate to every possible teenager by thinking of every possible thing that a teenager could like, and then translating it into dialogue, making it exceedingly hammy.

That issue of trying to relate to every possible teenager felt like the core of my issues with Every Variable of Us. It’s an issue that I often see in a lot of debut novels: authors want to cram every possible thing that they’re passionate about into a single novel; at best, it’s a labor of love, and at worst, it’s quite bloated. This novel suffered from this without a doubt. He just tried to tackle far too many issues, and as a result, the analysis of them was often surface-level. Bush talks about gang violence, abuse, having a parent with an addiction, homelessness, suddenly developing a disability, religious bigotry, and queerness all in one novel. While it’s admirable to write about this much (and there are of course people who live in these circumstances), Bush clearly didn’t have the page time to do justice to all of them without only giving an underdeveloped take on all but maybe…two or three of these issues. I do appreciate the handful of moments where the exploration of these topics actually did land; the moment at the end with Alexis’s mother was one of the only parts of the book that was emotionally impactful to me. But for the most part, this was just way too much for a single debut novel to be doing. In an attempt to try and address every issue that he seems to be outspoken about, Bush ends up hardly addressing them at all.

If there’s a lesson to be learned here, it’s that you can’t please everybody with a single novel, whether it’s the audience you’re appealing to or the groups that you’re trying to represent. Charles A. Bush just seemed too concerned with trying to make every possible reader in every parallel universe happy, which stretched the narrative thin. I get that there’s an insurmountable amount of pressure with a debut novel, but you do not need to please everybody! It’s okay! Breathe!

All in all, a debut novel that tried too hard to do too much, and ended up spiraling into a mess as a result. 1.75 stars.

Every Variable of Us is a standalone, and Charles A. Bush’s debut novel.

Today’s song:

That’s it for this week’s Book Review Tuesday! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!

Posted in Book Review Tuesday

Book Review Tuesday (1/13/26) – We Will Rise Again: Speculative Stories and Essays on Protest, Resistance, and Hope

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles, and from the bottom of my heart, fuck ICE. Rest in power, Renee Nicole Good. My heart goes out to everybody in Minneapolis right now. ❤️‍🩹

Whoo, look at me! Actually reviewing a book not long after it came out!!

I found out about We Will Rise Again soon after it came out, and it immediately caught my eye—in fact, it seemed almost specifically engineered for me. I mean, speculative fiction based on social justice? Come on. And while the stories and essays within it varied in quality, this anthology was a worthy endeavor and a much-needed collaboration.

Enjoy this week’s review!

We Will Rise Again: Speculative Stories and Essays on Protest, Resistance, and Hope – edited by Karen Lord, Annalee Newitz, and Malka Older

(description from The Storygraph:)

From genre luminaries, esteemed organizers, and exciting new voices in fiction, an anthology of stories, essays, and interviews that offer transformative visions of the future, fantastical alternate worlds, and inspiration for the social justice movements of tomorrow.

In this collection, editors Karen Lord, Annalee Newitz, and Malka Older champion realistic, progressive social change using the speculative stories of writers across the world. Exploring topics ranging from disability justice and environmental activism to community care and collective worldbuilding, these imaginative pieces from writers such as NK Jemisin, Charlie Jane Anders, Alejandro Heredia, Sam J. Miller, Nisi Shawl, and Sabrina Vourvoulias center solidarity, empathy, hope, joy, and creativity.

Each story is grounded within a broader sociopolitical framework using essays and interviews from movement leaders, including adrienne maree brown and Walidah Imarisha, charting the future history of protest, revolutions, and resistance with the same zeal for accuracy that speculative writers normally bring to science and technology. Using the vehicle of ambitious storytelling, We Will Rise Again offers effective tools for organizing, an unflinching interrogation of the status quo, and a blueprint for prefiguring a different world.

TW/CW: violence, transphobia, themes of oppression/marginalization, ableism, murder

Somehow, it’s so on brand that Ursula Vernon would be that hardcore about gardening. I always vaguely got that vibe from her work, but her essay was not a surprise in the slightest.

There were all kinds of speculative fiction authors featured in We Will Rise Again: familiar authors I’ve liked, familiar authors I haven’t been a fan of, and unfamiliar authors entirely; in fact, all three of the authors who edited the anthology (Karen Lord, Annalee Newitz, and Malka Older) are all hit-or-miss authors for me, but I stuck to this anthology because the concept was so compelling to me. Sure enough, not only were their stories fascinating, so were everyone else’s. Some of my favorites were Charlie Jane Anders’s “Realer Than Real,” a meditation on being transgender in the U.S. and poking fun at gender roles, Abdulla Moaswes’s “Kifaah and the Gospel,” a potent commentary about Palestinian resistance and the inherent absurdity of colonialism, and Malka Older’s “Aversion,” an excellent commentary about how to get people to pay attention and care about issues without having to expose them to a barrage of triggering, disturbing imagery. (The latter isn’t deeply relevant at all, no way! No way…) Whether in sci-fi, fantasy, or loosely speculative formats, all of them came together in a vibrant quilt of different perspectives and ideas.

The nonfiction in We Will Rise Again was, for the most part, equally potent. I was so excited to see Nicola Griffith featured in here, and her essay “Rewriting the Old Disability Script” was as timely as ever; even though disability representation in media at large, not to mention literature, has gradually gotten better, this was a potent reminder of the staggering lack of representation of disability of any kind in mainstream media. I’d already read N.K. Jemisin’s “How Long ‘Til Black Future Month? The Toxins of Speculative Fiction, and the Antidote That Is Janelle Monae,” but it fit perfectly in this anthology and was well worth a re-read. The very core of We Will Rise Again was that the fiction stories had tangible input from activists with real-world experience; without this, I still would’ve liked these stories, but with this added layer, they strangely gave me more hope. The faith of real-world activists embedded in fiction emphasizes what this anthology was really about, for me: educated, grounded hope for a better future.

However, with an anthology that cast such a wide net idea-wise, there’s bound to be some misses. I think the biggest issue with We Will Rise Again was that it verged on being too broad. Naturally, when you’re talking about social justice, there are so many things that you can talk about, and this anthology discusses the whole gamut of them in both fiction and nonfiction, from community care to transphobia to disability rights. For the most part, I could see the common thread through all of them easily. Some of them, however, bordered on being very loosely strung together; for instance, although I loved Vernon’s essay “The Quiet Heroics of Gardening,” the connection between it and the other stories was very, very loose. I think the issue was that not all of the fiction stories had nonfiction paired with them—the format they had with most of these stories could’ve cohesively been applied to all of them and given the anthology a better, more reasonable structure.

Overall, there weren’t any stories that I didn’t like, which is a rare thing in any given collaborate short story anthology. However, I did have a structural issue with some of them. Speculative fiction is a notoriously broad term, and I think some of the stories in this collection took that a little too seriously. While some of them were clearly sci-fi, fantasy, or at least had some speculation and change to the world, some of them barely felt speculative. For instance, if you took away the fleeting fantastical element of Vida James’s “Chupacabras,” I would’ve thought that it was only set a few years after the present—there wasn’t a ton that was new about it, and said fantastical element felt like an afterthought. (I had a similar issue with Sabrina Vourvoulias’s “Persefoni in the City.”) Even with some of the “this is only meant to be a few years from now” stories, I got that what was speculative was the politics (ex. with Izzy Wasserstein’s “The Rise and Fall of Storm Bluff, Kansas”), but with the ones I mentioned, hardly anything had changed. While I get that the focus wasn’t necessarily on the worldbuilding, with the anthology’s whole point being on genre/speculative fiction as a way of collective imagination and imagining better worlds, stories like those felt at odds with the intended message. “Speculative” was a bit generous of a term for some of those stories.

All in all, a diverse and hopeful anthology, both in terms of its contributors and its subject matter, all coming together to make powerful statements about how to survive in this landscape and dream of something better. 3.75 stars!

We Will Rise Again is a standalone anthology; Karen Lord is also the author of the Cygnus Beta series (The Best of All Possible Worlds, The Galaxy Game, and The Blue and Beautiful World). Annalee Newitz is also the author of The Terraformers, Autonomous, Automatic Noodle, and The Future of Another Timeline. Malka Older is also the author of The Investigations of Mossa and Pleiti series (The Mimicking of Known Successes, The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles, and The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses) and the Centenal Cycle (Infomocracy, Null States, and State Tectonics).

Today’s song:

LODGER 🙌

That’s it for this week’s Book Review Tuesday! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!

Posted in Book Review Tuesday

Book Review Tuesday (10/21/25) – Failure to Communicate

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!

I found out about this book earlier this year while looking for more sci-fi with queer and/or disabled rep (as I always am). This book seemed to have nearly the perfect premise—I just can’t get over how genius it is to have an autistic protagonist who’s had to study human behavior her whole life study alien behavior as well in order to initiate First Contact. I ended up buying it for Bookshop.org’s recent Anti-Prime Sale, and I ate it up in a handful of days. Though not without its flaws, Failure to Communicate delivers almost completely on its remarkable premise, full of political intrigue, aliens, and heart.

Enjoy this week’s review!

Failure to Communicate (Xandri Corelel, #1) – Kaia Sønderby

Xandri Corelel has spent her life studying everyone around her, be they people or aliens. She’s been forced to, after centuries of eugenics has made her one of the few autistic humans left in the universe. She uses these skills as a Xeno-Liaison, negotiating with all sorts of aliens on behalf of the Starsystems Alliance. But when presented with a potentially hostile species possessing one of the most powerful weapons in the universe, Xandri faces the most difficult negotiation of her career—one that may chance the face of interspecies relations forever.

TW/CW: ableism, xenophobia (fictional), violence, blood, genocide themes, slavery, animal death

“Autistic person spends entire life trying to understand human behavior, doesn’t fully understand it, then spends her entire career understanding alien behavior instead” has to win the gold medal for the best sci-fi premise I’ve heard in years. (Also, felt.) And though not all of it delivered on said premise, Failure to Communicate is a hidden gem for sure.

Now, I’m reviewing a space opera book which features a whole host of alien species, which means it’s time for my obligatory creature design rant. The aliens in Failure to Communicate are…a complicated case, for sure. The majority of them are basically larger, intelligent versions of real-world animals (with some brief exceptions), but Sønderby is self-aware of the fact; for instance, the Psittacans (a name that Xandri gave the species and didn’t develop on its own, thankfully) basically look like giant parrots, but Xandri explains that in-universe, all of their parrot-like features aren’t anything like what we would call, say, feathers, but evolved in such a way that they looked exactly like Earth parrots independently of Earth. This same explanation is given to pretty much all of the other species in the book, which is a bit too convenient to apply to 90% of the aliens in the novel. As for the Anmerilli, though I’m not disparaging the cover artist in any way, I feel like the cover didn’t do justice to their more alien features—and man, was I relieved that these aliens weren’t just humans with extra steps. Well…if you boiled it down, they kind of were, but there were enough traits that they at least got to the level of a decently compelling Star Wars humanoid. (Also, Sønderby’s descriptions of the Zechak also made me picture them as genocidal Piglins, which was…uh, interesting, for sure.)

But what almost made up with that for me was the in-depth explanations of their respective cultures. In the end, Failure to Communicate wasn’t necessarily a book about biology—it was a book about politics, anthropology, culture, and communication. That, at least, was incredibly fleshed out and much more thoroughly thought-out—as it should’ve been. Dissecting some of the alien cultures was one of the best parts of the novel. These cultures and the conflicts between them formed the backbone of the novel. Though until the end, Failure to Communicate is somewhat light on action, Xandri’s experiences with navigating the intricacies of dozens of alien cultures was nothing short of compelling—Sønderby has the mind of an anthropologist, and there was truly no stone left unturned. I loved that she didn’t shy away from depicting the discomfort that comes with interacting with other cultures for the first time and having one’s own values brush up against theirs—it’s bound to happen with First Contact, and it’s bound to happen in a lot of novel, multicultural interactions. There were some places where I felt there needed to be more nuance (ex. the whole situation with the Zechak; yes, they’re genocidal, but it verged too close to “this entire species consists of genocidal, cold-blooded killers,” which Xandri tries to self-correct, but isn’t emphasized enough. I’d find that hard to believe), but overall, I loved Sønderby’s cultural explorations.

Sønderby’s commitment to not shying away from discomfort was one of the best parts of the novel, and that was made manifest in her main character, Xandri. There was a ton about her that I loved—her keen eye for cultural quirks, her inner monologues about the idiosyncrasies of the neurodivergent world, and her unflappable sense of justice. However, she was far from a perfect character—even being in a world populated with aliens, she harbored her own unconscious biases and prejudices, which she frequently had to come to terms with throughout her mission. She lashed out, she made rash decisions—she was imperfect. And though she was easy to root for, she had plenty of flaws, a balance that is difficult for any author to strike.

Failure to Communicate isn’t an action-heavy book, which I’m all for—waiter! More cozy sci-fi, please! However, I hesitate to call this novel “cozy,” especially considering the moment when shit hits the fan during the last third of it. Everything that happens then swiftly merits the “cozy” title being unceremoniously ripped off. Nonetheless, Sønderby takes some cues from cozy sci-fi’s best; I loved how she let the plot meander in the more interpersonal conflicts as opposed to the big and showy ones, and let the often messy character dynamics take the lead. The ending was also messy and bittersweet, but not in a way that lacks resolution—it is a resolution, just a very complicated one with quite a lot of uncomfortable implications for Xandri. Another example of Sønderby not shying away from making things complex. I do like that it ended on a very hopeful note, as much of a wreck as some things ended up being.

Being neurodivergent, the subject of disability was part of what drew me into Failure to Communicate. I’ve mentioned on here that I have SPD, which shares some similarities with autism, and I related to Xandri’s lifelong mission to study and understand the neurotypical people around her in order to try and piece together how their world worked. She deals with a hefty dose of ableism (both from well-intentioned and malicious people) throughout the book, which was quite rough, but I loved that she never compromised her pride in being autistic. Sønderby takes the trope of futuristic societies erasing disability as a sign of progress to task, which amplifies Xandri’s struggles as an autistic woman into the struggles of possibly being the only autistic person in the entire galaxy. Which…yeah. The ableism is inevitable at that point. The only disability aspect that I’m not so sure about was having the twist that Marco was also disabled (specifically, he has bipolar disorder); I do appreciate that Sønderby uses it as an opportunity to show that almost identical conditions can produce a hero as well as a villain and that the pressures of ableism drove him to betray the team, but I really don’t think the latter had enough nuance to it. Not that disabled characters can’t be evil, obviously, but it felt too much like making a mentally ill character automatically a villain simply because they’re mentally ill. I’m willing to give Sønderby the benefit of the doubt because she handled all of the other disability-related topics so wonderfully, but it still didn’t sit completely right with me.

Also, I just have to mention that this book is so, so queer. BLESS. First off, I loved that Xandri was bisexual, but I appreciated that she was polyamorous too—there’s hardly any depictions of polyamory out there that don’t make their characters the butt of a joke or a fetish, so this was a breath of fresh air, for sure.

All in all, a wholly unique space opera about communication, culture, and collision. 4 stars!

Failure to Communicate is the first novel in the Xandri Corelel series, followed by Tone of Voice and preceded by Testing Pandora, a prequel novella. Kaia Sønderby is also the author of the YA fantasy novel Damsel to the Rescue.

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That’s it for this week’s Book Review Tuesday! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!